Maryland city struggles with day laborers

Three years ago, across the parking lot from the church, there was a health center that served people who only spoke Spanish. When it closed, several men who had gotten used to waiting there in the morning to find work kept coming. When neighbors opposed a plan to build a permanent day laborer hiring place one block from the church, the city government created a committee. The proposed site, on the corner of Maryland Route 355 and Brookes Avenue, now waits abandoned for the committee’s recommendation.

That Thursday morning the men’s uneasiness about being in a place where they were not wanted was compounded by the appearance of a man with a video camera. The man, a video journalist, was looking for a good place to shoot. His walking around with the camera fixed to a tripod that he held against his shoulder scared them.

“There, he took a picture,” said one of the day laborers after the cameraman was gone. “Deportation for sure.” He became the center of a conversation.

Another man added that the government was trying to deport all Hispanics. Yet a third one said that “they” could take a little photo and enlarge it so that all their faces could be seen.

The man at the center saw things differently. “The bible says that a nation of the north will be shattered. The devil is here,” he said.

Two days before, in a community center one mile and a half south on Route 355, the 15-member Gaithersburg Day Laborer Task Force, as the committee is formally known, held its sixth weekly meeting.

Lauren Husted, who lives one block from the proposed site, said that other cities had used ordinances as a way to deal with day laborers. She cited the example of Glendale, Calif., stressing the importance of having dedicated police. She said that nearby Herndon, Va., had used Glendale as a model but this was not without pitfalls since Herndon was being sued by the group known as Judicial Watch because of its ordinances.

According to the meeting’s minutes, Husted, the leader of the ordinances subcommittee, presented a report that upon review showed that “there was no clear model that could be held up as an example due to unresolved legal challenges.”

At the meeting, one ordinance under consideration called for all people to carry a government issued ID lest they be cited for loitering. “That’s not fair. That’s not just,” said one member, alleging that is was really hard for day laborers to get driver’s licenses. Another worried about the implications for passers-by. “I walk my dog with absolutely no ID,” she said.

The following Tuesday the committee met again. Chair Prentiss Searles handed the floor to Michael Wincek, the leader of a subcommittee tasked, according to minutes, with “developing specific criteria relating to a location for a new day laborer center that would be funded and operated by Montgomery County.”

Wincek, a practicing architect for 30 years who works near the proposed site, showed a presentation. The overhead projector tethered to a laptop computer beamed a color-coded zoning map of Gaithersburg.

“I think it shouldn’t be adjacent to residential or office,” said Wincek of the day laborer site as he deftly showed one slide after another. “Zoning is there for a reason.”

Like a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces are taken, the color-coded zones disappeared one by one. Hues representing residential areas were excluded from a final map that showed only industrial zones on the outskirts of the city.

Wincek also showed his concept of a bespoke day laborer center, surrounded by trees and depressed so it wouldn’t be seen from nearby roads. He concluded that maybe the city was “too developed and too residential” and thus not the ideal place for day laborers.

The Saturday after the meeting, a man walked about asking for spare change to complete his bus fare, just a few steps beyond where the hiring site would have been. In its place, the dilapidated one-story building of what used to be a water treatment supplier stood vacant.

Two hundred yards up Brookes Avenue, toward the center of town, a house had a For Sale sign in its front yard. The four-bedroom, two-bathroom Victorian was listed in the Long and Foster realtor’s Web site for $590,000.

A little farther up, past the historic district plaque that said that the Brookes and Russell subdivision was platted in 1892, were the luxury apartments of the Park Station at Old Towne, built in 1999.

According to the May 2003 issue of Builder/Architect, “Park Station’s four story, high-density unique design with above ground parking in the middle of the site attracted a new demographic to Gaithersburg. Rent increased from $500 to $1,200.”

Earlier that morning, three blocks away in the church’s parking lot, another demographic waited, like it does everyday, to be picked out to earn its wage for the day.